Suprised Apple partnered with Promise... they don't exactly have a stellar reputation for quality or performance. I still fondly recall the Athlon XP days where glitchy Promise raid controllers with terrible drivers were eating people's data for breakfast.
How is this an Apple partnership? Neither making Mac peripherals nor having your hardware sold in Apple stores require "partnerships", unless you plan to weaken the term so much that it is meaningless.
No they are just resellers and are adding money on Apples books. Pretty much. However they do use and support Promise for their Xsan/Quantum StoreNext product and are partnering that way. Instead of for example just selling Quantum's own storage products which is also compatible. And as a replacement for their shut down Xserve RAID-line for that matter. They would gladly sell any other Thunderbolt solution when available.
I believe that comparison is quite irrelevant, eSATA and USB3.0 are both cheap consumer interfaces.
If you're looking at a 2000 bucks NAS (lol seriously) and this kind of performance, why not compare with something that could cost 2000 bucks when packaged (like for example a 1000 bucks box like I'd build it).
Oh well you can't quite do that, because 10GbE is not yet standard on motherboards.. but on the other hand, who the f* needs a NAS that doesn't sit on the network...
This product is definitely very niche, and practically will be completely useless +- 1 year from now when every motherboard has 10GbE included for free.
Could anyone familiar with cheap server hardware make a rough estimate of the cost of a cheap 10GbE mobo w/ switch ? (iirc that should be somewhere below 1k --)
A 10GbE mobo would cost like $1100 dollars, and a cheap 10GbE network card would cost like $500 dollars. Add in a hardware RAID 5-card and it's another $300 dollars at least.
So at minimum it's a low-end board with x8 slot (you can use a free x16 slot for it too) for 10 GbE card, x4/x8 (or free x16 slot) for hw RAID 5 card, 10 GbE switch and a 10 GbE card in your client which for a compatible card in a Mac Pro is 1500 dollars. Adds up to about $170 motherboard, $210 cpu, $120 memory, $500 10 GbE network card, $300 HW RAID 5 card for four to eight disks, about $185 for case and power supply and another $480 for six 2TB hard drives. Which altogether is about $1965 USD plus 10GbE network card for the clients, and a 10GbE switch which is about $15 000 dollars. There is nothing cheap about going 10GbE. And they won't include it for free.
It will be below 20 000 dollars. Using cheap stuff.
Are the 6TB and 8TB offerings really priced the same?
Looking at Newegg, I can buy the 1GB Deskstar for $60 and the 2GB for $120. Subtracting these etail prices from these things, the value of the rest of the system is:
Will your system look as nice as this one? use the same power? be as convivial and easy to operate? ... there's no distortion field is that everything comes at a price and some are ready to pay for it!
Come back to reality my friend, 10 GbE is not standard yet, and while that lasts, this thunderbolt thingy puts it in a different category (of DAS, and faster access).
I've got my own raid10 4TB NAS, it's much more useful to me than this thing, but over 1GbE you can't quite go past 100 MB/Sec ;)
But Thunderbolt only provides data to a single computer. Which makes it about as useful (or useless) as any other external drive. It might be fast, but really - who needs this kind of speed and has a single Macbook or iMac? I have over 10TB on my server and it gets accessed by a half dozen machines on a daily basis.
Maybe it is a NAS issue for you, but I can read/write at over 100Mbs with my WHS box.
This is not the cheapest nor the more expensive solution. This is also not the fastest or the slowest product you can buy. For laptops this will probably be the fastest product you can buy at the moment. It might be faster than USB3 but remember these technologies are not similar. Thunderbolt as direct memory access like firewire. For many people this isn't a problem and it is a plus. Personally i wont trust thunderbolt keychains and dongles unless i can turn off the device manually via the OS. But again for the market this box is in, it just might be the best thing currently available.
"The packaging isn't quite as nice as what we're used to from Apple, but the device inside is really what matters."
The packaging of what? The cable? It's a cable, does it really need more complex and wasteful packaging? The Promise device? It's not from Apple, why would Apple have any say in the design of the packaging?
6 x 75$ drives 1 x 40$ cable 1 x 200$ hardware and construction
about 900$ apple tax and profits.
A 10gbps network card is now 500$ and could get down to around 300$ if there would be interest from public - could easily get two 10gbps network cards and build your own Promise Pegasus R6 12TB for less than 1500$.
Jesus dude, WHAT FSCKING "Apple Tax"? You do understand that this is NOT an Apple product, right? That's why the box has Promise written on it in big letters, not Apple written in big letters.
Do you run around complaining about "the Windows tax" because myrinet devices or infiniband devices are more expensive than ethernet?
Apple had an agreement with Apple to release Thunderbolt on Apple and Apple has the exclusivity for it for a period.
The reasoning Intel probably had is that if Apple can get people hooked to Thunderbold as the only way to transfer data from laptops to ipads to iphones along with the iTunes drm and high prices, it will then be easier to port it to PC and get high license fees and something unique to Intel systems.
Thunderbold is basically "Light Peak" from intel, renamed.. see the Wikipedia article if you don't believe me. It was supposed to be a fiber optics only but Intel couldn't manage to reduce the power requirements and volume of the parts and the costs in time so they fell back to using copper - as it is right now it's basically a 20 gbps copper connection. Yet, this device can only do about 650 MB/s or about 6 gbps , something that can be almost done nowadays on USB 3 and can easily be done with 10gbps network cards and a regular 3$ cat 6 net cable.
Thunderbolt is Intel's own god damn brand for flying spaghetti monsters sake! It's a good fit in the prosumer and professional market that Apple also has, your post is so irrelevant it's ludicrous no consumer devices like cell phones will get Thunderbolt as it uses PCI-Express. Which means a device like this is internally x2 PCI-Express version 2.0 or x4 PCI-Express 1.1 and thus limited to 8Gbit/s bidirectional over this 10Gbit/s bidirectional link aka Thunderbolt. Intel's chipset will get USB 3 with Ivy Bridge, thus also Apple later on. Thats what future mobile phones will use not this. But Thunderbolt will still be a addon chip attached to PCI-Express lanes. It's the device that is limited to the ~650MB/s. It's only four or six consumer drives in raid 5. For a cheap controller in solutions like this one it's pretty good.
And a NAS with 10GbE won't magically do 650MB/s easily or cheaply for that matter. Network protocols like SMB won't pull that. Neither is it aimed at those, Promise sells SANs and FC-adapters for those that need multiuser storage. A Mac Pro with Raid 5 card directly won't exactly be cheaper then this either. Your post is only ridiculous and clueless.
It's not for backing up to your overpriced Time Capsule at home. And you will be able to use cheap USB 3 drives next year without adapters when Ivy Bridge Macs are out. This is not to compete with USB 3. It's also definitively more robust, faster and everything will work like it would natively with an internal raid-setup pretty much. It's also used by professional tools where USB 3 wouldn't be a good fit.
Apple does not have exclusivity on Thunderbolt. Intel themselves said that PC builders and OEMs can add Thunderbolt at their own discretion. Sony already has an ultraslim with Thunderbolt, as well as a custom dock it plugs into via TB that has an outboard dedicated GPU (cool!) and outputs for three additional external displays. This is before Apple's own Thunderbolt equipped Macbook Airs have been released.
It is in the hands of companies to get going on these. I want Thunderbolt in my next PC build, and I want it on the motherboard and not via a PCI-E card. Hopefully next year.
I put together a 4TB RAID 5 array for my new Core i7 2600K system for half the cost of this 4TB model. Performance is great considering I am only using 4 bays. I don't see Thunderbolt having a huge impact unless the price comes down.
Sure 10GBps vs 4.5Gbps can be big, but 4.5Gbps is already super fast, and cheaper, much cheaper.
Now if Apple only gave us a choice and included USB3 with their hardware...
USB 3.0 will come with Intel's Ivy Bridge next year for all the consumer stuff. You can already use USB 3.0 with MBP 17 through Expresscard. It will be included later as said without any markup though.
The guy was looking for a way into the article, and used the packaging as a stepladder. It may be inconsequential to the raw facts, but it's a reviewers take on a product. If you don't like it download datatsheets.
drive speed actually isn't even the issue at these speeds... the real issue is latency and drive alignment.
Don't know how much you know about it but I'll make it super easy, When drives are spinning at 7200 rpm, the data physically on the disk you are reading from could be on the opposite side of the physical hard disk as it is spinning, so you have to wait for the disk to get around to where the read/write head is on the hard drive to pull the information from the disk. This is known commonly as Latency :)
Wikipedia has a good equation/example for this.. scroll down to "RAID 5 Latency"
although this specifies RAID 5 as being the only RAID level with problems, do realize that others also share this issue. Some RAID levels arrange the drives/align the drives when they spin up so they will stripe accordingly and in sync, but unless you are spending $20K+ you're probably not seeing that kind of quality in any RAID application... especially not at the home consumer level.
At these speeds, drive latency is going to be the biggest issue.
There is no "Apple tax" and the "closed" technology/standard here is just as closed as say - PCIexpress, USB2, SATA and Firewire - ALSO developed by Intel -iirc.
This is very new prosumer tech. Just because this tech does not currently (or may never) fit your needs/wants/desires - it does not follow that there is no market for this. Also keep in mind this is a possible way to "future proof" your system ... at least as future proof as you can get. Want two or three extra high res monitors for your laptop? No problem - this port has the bandwidth... want to add USB3 to your current TB laptop? no problem (in theory) ... now you dont need those expensive Magma chassis to put in extra cards for USB, video, networking, etc....
The few of you attempting to figure the cost are way off... unless I missed something there are a couple factors here:
1) how much is your data worth? ... if you just have a few crappy movies - maybe not much, but maybe you are running a business or two off this type of tech? The consideration is not getting this for home use (necessarily), but how reliable, how big and fast this device is.
2) how much is the raid controller and software worth? What happens when a drive dies, how fast/reliable is the rebuild? What are the odds the controllers dies or the the power supply on the box dies? Will the RAID card corrupt your data? What's the SLA for your replacement parts?
3) also pricing may come down - eventually.
RAID 5 is nice - for REDUNDANCY - not necessarily speed. A RAID 0 SSD setup will get you more speed, but if one drive goes sideways - you project is well... gone.
You ever see the size of a mail store for even a small (50 person) company?
You connect your RAID to your Mac Mini and YOUR backup as well (you can make a bootable via scripts) and their's some oK redundancy there.
So yeah, you do not need 10GigE ... his is more for HD video and other large (heavy) data sets, though it is ironic how Apple is doing its best to kill off all their Pro apps, hardware, etc...
So you can have several NASs .... and one or two VM servers ... or you can have several servers - each with their own direct attached storage.
Yes you can get CHEAPER and you can probably get 85% of the performance of this setup... but you can also crash and burn.
I do believe the one post where Apple can get rid of the Pro Towers for the Mini's and the Mac Books (and might keep the MBPro)...
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dagamer34 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Hopefully Monoprice.com will come and save the day.quiksilvr - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
They usually do.Zap - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
No kidding! Wonder if there are any licensing fees for the cable/connector/tech?greenbelt - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
It should be avialable to all OEM vendors.Ninhalem - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Ouch. $50 for a 2 m cable. That price is steep. I'll wait till Monoprice gets some of these cables in stock.seapeople - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
If you're buying a $1500 6-bay hard drive enclosure does spending $50 on a cable really matter so much that you would delay your purchase?Pessimism - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Suprised Apple partnered with Promise... they don't exactly have a stellar reputation for quality or performance. I still fondly recall the Athlon XP days where glitchy Promise raid controllers with terrible drivers were eating people's data for breakfast.davegraham - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
even better...how about when Promise nuked Carbonite's data? ;)CharonPDX - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
It's amazing how things change in a decade, really...Yes, I have my own industry prejudices, but I've had to overcome them. (IBM Deathstar, anyone?)
name99 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
How is this an Apple partnership?Neither making Mac peripherals nor having your hardware sold in Apple stores require "partnerships", unless you plan to weaken the term so much that it is meaningless.
Penti - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
No they are just resellers and are adding money on Apples books. Pretty much. However they do use and support Promise for their Xsan/Quantum StoreNext product and are partnering that way. Instead of for example just selling Quantum's own storage products which is also compatible. And as a replacement for their shut down Xserve RAID-line for that matter. They would gladly sell any other Thunderbolt solution when available.nafhan - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Looking forward to seeing some comparisons vs. eSATA...Silenus - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Indeed. It should entertaining how much it blows eSATA and USB 3 out of the water!L. - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
I believe that comparison is quite irrelevant, eSATA and USB3.0 are both cheap consumer interfaces.If you're looking at a 2000 bucks NAS (lol seriously) and this kind of performance, why not compare with something that could cost 2000 bucks when packaged (like for example a 1000 bucks box like I'd build it).
Oh well you can't quite do that, because 10GbE is not yet standard on motherboards.. but on the other hand, who the f* needs a NAS that doesn't sit on the network...
This product is definitely very niche, and practically will be completely useless +- 1 year from now when every motherboard has 10GbE included for free.
Could anyone familiar with cheap server hardware make a rough estimate of the cost of a cheap 10GbE mobo w/ switch ? (iirc that should be somewhere below 1k --)
Penti - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
A 10GbE mobo would cost like $1100 dollars, and a cheap 10GbE network card would cost like $500 dollars. Add in a hardware RAID 5-card and it's another $300 dollars at least.So at minimum it's a low-end board with x8 slot (you can use a free x16 slot for it too) for 10 GbE card, x4/x8 (or free x16 slot) for hw RAID 5 card, 10 GbE switch and a 10 GbE card in your client which for a compatible card in a Mac Pro is 1500 dollars. Adds up to about $170 motherboard, $210 cpu, $120 memory, $500 10 GbE network card, $300 HW RAID 5 card for four to eight disks, about $185 for case and power supply and another $480 for six 2TB hard drives. Which altogether is about $1965 USD plus 10GbE network card for the clients, and a 10GbE switch which is about $15 000 dollars. There is nothing cheap about going 10GbE. And they won't include it for free.
It will be below 20 000 dollars. Using cheap stuff.
casteve - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Are the 6TB and 8TB offerings really priced the same?Looking at Newegg, I can buy the 1GB Deskstar for $60 and the 2GB for $120. Subtracting these etail prices from these things, the value of the rest of the system is:
R4/4TB = $759
R4/8TB = $1019
R6/8TB = $1139
R8/12TB = $1279
Yowsa.
piroroadkill - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
You've discovered the NAS price distortion field!Every fucking NAS is overpriced. You can always build a machine for less than a NAS. It makes absolutely no sense.
piroroadkill - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Sorry, this isn't even a NAS, I apologise, but you get my point, and it still stands. Senseless.Strunf - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Will your system look as nice as this one? use the same power? be as convivial and easy to operate? ... there's no distortion field is that everything comes at a price and some are ready to pay for it!Exodite - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
For 1500-2000 USD I'll build a mATX killer desktop as a NAS, including a nice SSD and those 12GB of HDD storage.I realize this is Apple land but with that markup I could probably have a case custom-built to my specifications of 'nice' for less money.
L. - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
No.Come back to reality my friend, 10 GbE is not standard yet, and while that lasts, this thunderbolt thingy puts it in a different category (of DAS, and faster access).
I've got my own raid10 4TB NAS, it's much more useful to me than this thing, but over 1GbE you can't quite go past 100 MB/Sec ;)
mcnabney - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
But Thunderbolt only provides data to a single computer. Which makes it about as useful (or useless) as any other external drive. It might be fast, but really - who needs this kind of speed and has a single Macbook or iMac? I have over 10TB on my server and it gets accessed by a half dozen machines on a daily basis.Maybe it is a NAS issue for you, but I can read/write at over 100Mbs with my WHS box.
MGSsancho - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
I believe this would be called a DAS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-attached_stora...This is not the cheapest nor the more expensive solution. This is also not the fastest or the slowest product you can buy. For laptops this will probably be the fastest product you can buy at the moment. It might be faster than USB3 but remember these technologies are not similar. Thunderbolt as direct memory access like firewire. For many people this isn't a problem and it is a plus. Personally i wont trust thunderbolt keychains and dongles unless i can turn off the device manually via the OS. But again for the market this box is in, it just might be the best thing currently available.
dagamer34 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
There's a reason they don't sell the box without the drives....IdBuRnS - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
"The packaging isn't quite as nice as what we're used to from Apple, but the device inside is really what matters."The packaging of what? The cable? It's a cable, does it really need more complex and wasteful packaging? The Promise device? It's not from Apple, why would Apple have any say in the design of the packaging?
Seriously?
mariush - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
6 x 75$ drives1 x 40$ cable
1 x 200$ hardware and construction
about 900$ apple tax and profits.
A 10gbps network card is now 500$ and could get down to around 300$ if there would be interest from public - could easily get two 10gbps network cards and build your own Promise Pegasus R6 12TB for less than 1500$.
name99 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Jesus dude, WHAT FSCKING "Apple Tax"?You do understand that this is NOT an Apple product, right? That's why the box has Promise written on it in big letters, not Apple written in big letters.
Do you run around complaining about "the Windows tax" because myrinet devices or infiniband devices are more expensive than ethernet?
mariush - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Apple had an agreement with Apple to release Thunderbolt on Apple and Apple has the exclusivity for it for a period.The reasoning Intel probably had is that if Apple can get people hooked to Thunderbold as the only way to transfer data from laptops to ipads to iphones along with the iTunes drm and high prices, it will then be easier to port it to PC and get high license fees and something unique to Intel systems.
Thunderbold is basically "Light Peak" from intel, renamed.. see the Wikipedia article if you don't believe me. It was supposed to be a fiber optics only but Intel couldn't manage to reduce the power requirements and volume of the parts and the costs in time so they fell back to using copper - as it is right now it's basically a 20 gbps copper connection.
Yet, this device can only do about 650 MB/s or about 6 gbps , something that can be almost done nowadays on USB 3 and can easily be done with 10gbps network cards and a regular 3$ cat 6 net cable.
mariush - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Sorry.. Intel had an agreement with Apple.Penti - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Thunderbolt is Intel's own god damn brand for flying spaghetti monsters sake! It's a good fit in the prosumer and professional market that Apple also has, your post is so irrelevant it's ludicrous no consumer devices like cell phones will get Thunderbolt as it uses PCI-Express. Which means a device like this is internally x2 PCI-Express version 2.0 or x4 PCI-Express 1.1 and thus limited to 8Gbit/s bidirectional over this 10Gbit/s bidirectional link aka Thunderbolt. Intel's chipset will get USB 3 with Ivy Bridge, thus also Apple later on. Thats what future mobile phones will use not this. But Thunderbolt will still be a addon chip attached to PCI-Express lanes. It's the device that is limited to the ~650MB/s. It's only four or six consumer drives in raid 5. For a cheap controller in solutions like this one it's pretty good.And a NAS with 10GbE won't magically do 650MB/s easily or cheaply for that matter. Network protocols like SMB won't pull that. Neither is it aimed at those, Promise sells SANs and FC-adapters for those that need multiuser storage. A Mac Pro with Raid 5 card directly won't exactly be cheaper then this either. Your post is only ridiculous and clueless.
It's not for backing up to your overpriced Time Capsule at home. And you will be able to use cheap USB 3 drives next year without adapters when Ivy Bridge Macs are out. This is not to compete with USB 3. It's also definitively more robust, faster and everything will work like it would natively with an internal raid-setup pretty much. It's also used by professional tools where USB 3 wouldn't be a good fit.
KoolAidMan1 - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
Apple does not have exclusivity on Thunderbolt. Intel themselves said that PC builders and OEMs can add Thunderbolt at their own discretion. Sony already has an ultraslim with Thunderbolt, as well as a custom dock it plugs into via TB that has an outboard dedicated GPU (cool!) and outputs for three additional external displays. This is before Apple's own Thunderbolt equipped Macbook Airs have been released.It is in the hands of companies to get going on these. I want Thunderbolt in my next PC build, and I want it on the motherboard and not via a PCI-E card. Hopefully next year.
Landiepete - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Apple are plugging the thing on their website. You can bet your hind quarter there is an Apple tax involved. If only to be associated with Apple.L. - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Don't forget there is configuration, ease of use and all that stuff, which you do not include in your quote ;)Also 10GbE is not cheap yet ..
NickDG17 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
I put together a 4TB RAID 5 array for my new Core i7 2600K system for half the cost of this 4TB model. Performance is great considering I am only using 4 bays. I don't see Thunderbolt having a huge impact unless the price comes down.Sure 10GBps vs 4.5Gbps can be big, but 4.5Gbps is already super fast, and cheaper, much cheaper.
Now if Apple only gave us a choice and included USB3 with their hardware...
dagamer34 - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Need an external solution for laptops so the Mac Pro will no longer be needed.L. - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Raid 5 is bad mkay. read up, stop using it, be one with the world ;)Fatchap - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
OK, I'll bite. in what way is RAID 5 bad?Penti - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
USB 3.0 will come with Intel's Ivy Bridge next year for all the consumer stuff. You can already use USB 3.0 with MBP 17 through Expresscard. It will be included later as said without any markup though.kyhwana - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Can you test this thing with SSDs? See where the bottleneck is..Alphacrux - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Any way to automatically remove posts from those stupid spammers? Honestly, does anyone buy anything at all from these idiotic sites?Steveymoo - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
I like the way your third sentence of the article mentions the fact that the packaging "isn't quite as nice as what we're used to from Apple."I mean.... Really??? This is meant to be a RAID device for professional editors/artists. I know you're an Apple user, but.... just............. wtf.
Landiepete - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Please extract your thumb trom your rectal tract.The guy was looking for a way into the article, and used the packaging as a stepladder.
It may be inconsequential to the raw facts, but it's a reviewers take on a product. If you don't like it download datatsheets.
usb4ftw - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
I really like the idea of a universal bus for every external device from a monitor to a drive to a memory stick to whatever...not a fan of closed standards though
is the maximum speed on this pegasus drive a thunderbolt bottleneck or a drive bottleneck, thats what id like to know
i'm guesssing its going to be the drive
blacknight582 - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
drive speed actually isn't even the issue at these speeds... the real issue is latency and drive alignment.Don't know how much you know about it but I'll make it super easy,
When drives are spinning at 7200 rpm, the data physically on the disk you are reading from could be on the opposite side of the physical hard disk as it is spinning, so you have to wait for the disk to get around to where the read/write head is on the hard drive to pull the information from the disk.
This is known commonly as Latency :)
Wikipedia has a good equation/example for this.. scroll down to "RAID 5 Latency"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
although this specifies RAID 5 as being the only RAID level with problems, do realize that others also share this issue. Some RAID levels arrange the drives/align the drives when they spin up so they will stripe accordingly and in sync, but unless you are spending $20K+ you're probably not seeing that kind of quality in any RAID application... especially not at the home consumer level.
At these speeds, drive latency is going to be the biggest issue.
centaur1 - Monday, July 4, 2011 - link
Ok, these things come with 2TB drives. Any idea if the 3TBs will work in them?:-)
xMoe - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
There is no "Apple tax" and the "closed" technology/standard here is just as closed as say - PCIexpress, USB2, SATA and Firewire - ALSO developed by Intel -iirc.This is very new prosumer tech. Just because this tech does not currently (or may never) fit your needs/wants/desires - it does not follow that there is no market for this. Also keep in mind this is a possible way to "future proof" your system ... at least as future proof as you can get. Want two or three extra high res monitors for your laptop? No problem - this port has the bandwidth... want to add USB3 to your current TB laptop? no problem (in theory) ... now you dont need those expensive Magma chassis to put in extra cards for USB, video, networking, etc....
The few of you attempting to figure the cost are way off... unless I missed something there are a couple factors here:
1) how much is your data worth? ... if you just have a few crappy movies - maybe not much, but maybe you are running a business or two off this type of tech? The consideration is not getting this for home use (necessarily), but how reliable, how big and fast this device is.
2) how much is the raid controller and software worth? What happens when a drive dies, how fast/reliable is the rebuild? What are the odds the controllers dies or the the power supply on the box dies? Will the RAID card corrupt your data? What's the SLA for your replacement parts?
3) also pricing may come down - eventually.
RAID 5 is nice - for REDUNDANCY - not necessarily speed. A RAID 0 SSD setup will get you more speed, but if one drive goes sideways - you project is well... gone.
You ever see the size of a mail store for even a small (50 person) company?
You connect your RAID to your Mac Mini and YOUR backup as well (you can make a bootable via scripts) and their's some oK redundancy there.
So yeah, you do not need 10GigE ... his is more for HD video and other large (heavy) data sets, though it is ironic how Apple is doing its best to kill off all their Pro apps, hardware, etc...
So you can have several NASs .... and one or two VM servers ... or you can have several servers - each with their own direct attached storage.
Yes you can get CHEAPER and you can probably get 85% of the performance of this setup... but you can also crash and burn.
I do believe the one post where Apple can get rid of the Pro Towers for the Mini's and the Mac Books (and might keep the MBPro)...
percykwong - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
I figured it out and posted the solution.swimminginthought.com
Hope it makes some of you happy.